What Meets the Eye (and What Doesn’t)

The descent wasn’t bad. It was like a long waterslide, without the water. It dumped them out in a forest.

But something was off about this place.

Granted, Aru didn’t have much experience with forests. Once, her mother had taken her to San Francisco. At first it had seemed like it was going to be a boring trip, because they spent the whole morning with the curator of the Asian Art Museum. But after lunch, her mother had taken her to Muir Woods. Walking through it was like a delicious dream. It had smelled like peppermint. The sunlight was soft and feathered, hardly skimming the forest floor because the trees were so thick and tall.

But this place, tucked inside a pocket of the Kingdom of Death, didn’t have that foresty feel. Aru sniffed the air. There was no perfume of green and wriggling alive-ness. No smell of woodsmoke or still ponds.

It didn’t have a smell at all.

Mini toed the ground. “This doesn’t feel like dirt.”

Aru bent to check it out. She ran her fingers over the floor. It was silk.

She walked to one of the trees, planning to snap off a branch and inspect it, but instead walked straight through it.

“It’s not real!” exclaimed Mini. She jumped through another one of the trees. “This is amazing!”

A small puddle of water caught the light.

“What is this going to be, a trampoline?” Mini laughed, jumping into it. But the second she did, the liquid stuck to her legs. And then it pulled. With every blink, Mini was vanishing beneath the—

“QUICKSAAAAAND!” screamed Mini. She started struggling.

“Stop!” shouted Aru. “Haven’t you seen any movies? Thrashing around is, like, the fastest way to die!”

“Quicksandquicksandquicksand,” moaned Mini. “I don’t want to go this way. My body will be preserved forever like those bog mummies! I’ll become a Wikipedia page!”

“You’re not gonna die, Mini. Just stop screaming and let me think for a minute!”

She was going to reach for a branch to pull out Mini, but the branches weren’t really there. Aru ran through a couple of the trees. Maybe there was an actual tree lurking in the midst? But there wasn’t.

“Aru!” screamed Mini. By now, she was up to her neck. Any farther, and she wouldn’t even be able to scream. Her arms waved wildly in the air.

“I’m coming!” said Aru, running back.

But Aru tripped. She braced herself for a fall, but of course, the silky ground was soft. She landed with a light thump. When she looked down, her hands were clutching folds of the “dirt.”

“That’s it,” whispered Aru.

She lifted some silk off the ground. It came up in a dark, slender rope. Aru dragged it over to Mini, who, by now, was buried up to her chin.

Mini grabbed hold of the rope, but the quicksand yanked her under.

“No!” cried Aru.

She pulled the rope as hard as she could. Under ordinary circumstances, she might not have been able to do it. Under ordinary circumstances, Aru probably would have slipped into the quicksand herself and both of them would have become dismal Wikipedia pages.

But worry for a friend can make ordinary circumstances extraordinary. In that moment, all Aru knew was that Mini was her first true friend in a long time…and she would not—could not—lose her.

Mini gasped as Aru heaved her onto the silky ground.

Aru was shocked. She did it. She saved her. Even though she’d faced down a demon and tricked the seasons, this was the first time she felt like she’d done something magical.

Mini spluttered and coughed. “There was a shark down there.” She shuddered, then gathered a handful of silk and started toweling off her hair. “A shark! And you know what it said to me? It said, ‘Is it true your sharks don’t talk?’ I didn’t have a chance to answer, because you pulled me out so quickly.”

“What kind of thank-you is that?”

“Why should I say thank you?” asked Mini. “I knew you could do it.”

I knew you could do it.

Aru bit back a grin. “Fine. Next time I’ll let you drown a bit longer.”

“No!” squeaked Mini. “Drowning is number three on my Top Ten Ways I Don’t Want to Die list.”

“Who makes a list of that?”

Mini primly straightened her shirt. “I find that organizing scary information actually makes me less scared.”

Once Mini had finished toweling off, they looked at the path ahead of them. The road that wound through the forest was the same color as the DEIGN sign.

“Do you think it goes to another hall?” asked Aru.

“Maybe? I wish we had a map again,” Mini said, squinting as she studied her hand.

Ever since they had arrived in the Kingdom of Death, the mehndi had grown lighter and lighter, as they did naturally, because they were not permanent. But now all that remained of the fantastical designs were faint waves on their fingers and the dark Sanskrit numbers on their palms.

The forest arced over them. In this place there was even a sky. But given how topsy-turvy everything was, Aru wondered whether it was a sea. Maybe here the moon really was made of cheese.

“Does this place feel familiar to you?” asked Mini. She rubbed her arms as if she had goose bumps.

“No?”

Aru would have remembered a place that looked like this. But she couldn’t deny the smell that she had caught right before they’d jumped into DEIGN. It was the smell of…home.

She was still thinking about this when she experienced a very rude awakening. Every tree they had seen so far had been intangible, so Aru had walked straight through them. She was passing through one of the trunks, not really minding where she was going, when she smacked her nose. Hard.

“What the—?” she muttered, glaring.

She had run into the side of a cliff. A rocky black wall glistening with water. No, it was a hard waterfall. She reached out to touch it carefully. It seemed like actual water, cold and cascading through her fingers. But the minute she tried to put her hand through it, it pushed back. As firm as stone.

“Yet another illusion,” said Aru. “Except this one’s got substance to it.”

Beside her, Mini paled. “Aru, that’s it! I think I know where we are!”

Mini closed her eyes and put her hand on the waterfall. She groped around, and then her hand abruptly stopped moving. She must have found what she was looking for, because her eyes opened suddenly. Behind the waterfall, Aru heard the faintest unclasping sound. Like a key sliding into a lock.

The next instant, the waterfall swung open.

It hadn’t been a waterfall at all, but a secret door.

“Just like in the stories about the Palace of Illusions,” breathed Mini.

“Is this your wisdom cookie speaking, or you?”

“Me,” said Mini, frowning. “I only remember the story because of the carnival my mom took me and my brother to. She brought it up when we went to the place with all the weird mirrors—”

“You mean the fun house?”

“Right, that. She told me the Pandavas had lived in a place like that. A famous demon king, who was also a really great architect, made it for them.”

Aru remembered hearing that story. In exchange for their sparing his life, the demon king Mayasura agreed to build the Pandava brothers the most beautiful palace the world had ever seen. It came with illusions that befuddled the mind and heightened the senses. They were so convincing that when an enemy prince (who was also the Pandavas’ cousin) came to visit, he fell through a floor tile that was actually water, and he nearly broke his foot jumping into a pool that turned out to be cleverly polished sapphires.

“What if this is the original palace?” asked Mini. “Maybe that’s how I knew how to open the door?”

“So what if it is? It’s not like we’ll remember anything about it from our former lives. It’s just a house, no big deal. And I doubt it’s the real Palace of Illusions. What would it be doing here, anyway? We didn’t reside in the Kingdom of Death….”

Mini frowned. “Uncle Chitrigupta said we’d find all kinds of things here, including forgotten things. Maybe when people forgot about the palace, it moved to the forest?”

“It’s a house! Not a person,” said Aru.

But Mini didn’t look so convinced. The path led to the waterfall door, and there were no other routes around it. “We have to go through the palace, don’t we?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “I really don’t want to. I couldn’t even get through the Haunted Mansion in Disney World. My dad had to take me out.”

“Well, if we have to go through it, it’s going to be fine. It’s a palace. It might be a bit weird inside, but we’ve seen a lot of weird stuff on this trip! Like a magical-door crocodile, and Door of Death dogs, and I don’t even want to think about what else. You can get past a couple of stones, some statues, and some optical illusions. Trust me.”

Mini took a deep breath. “Fine, if you say so.”

“Plus, think about it this way: if there are any enchantments inside, you have the magical compact. Just swing it around and look at things out of the corner of your eye.”

Mini nodded, threw back her shoulders, and pushed open the door.

Aru walked in after her. The stone door closed behind them, cutting off the sound of the waterfall and leaving a deep silence. Was this how everyone had once entered the palace of the Pandavas? For a moment, Aru wondered about the life she had apparently lived thousands of years ago. How many times had her former self run into the hard waterfall? Or maybe Arjuna had never hit his head on anything. It didn’t make any sense how they could share the same soul and be completely different.

Beneath her feet, dust caked the palace floor. She caught the sheen of lapis lazuli tiles that must have been brilliant in their day. Now they were cracked. The air had that unstirred quality of an abandoned house.

Or a mausoleum.

“I bet it was really pretty once,” said Mini.

Aru grimaced as she looked around her. Some dust—at least she hoped it was dust and not pulverized skeletons or something equally gross—fell onto her shoulder from the crumbling ceilings. “Yeah…once.”

“Huh. What’s this?” asked Mini.

She touched a cobwebbed torch on the wall. Aru wondered if this was going to be one of those Indiana Jones moments and now the floor was going to open up beneath them.

Instead, the torch glowed.

“Mini, ‘what’s this’ is never a good question in a movie—”

But she didn’t get a chance to finish. Around them, the air began to crackle. The shadowy palace halls brightened as torches flickered to life along all the walls.

And then the sound of cantering hooves thundered through the palace. For one sparkling moment, Aru wondered whether Indra’s seven-headed horse was coming to save them and get them out of here. Instead, a herd of horses charged toward them. If a herd of horses were charging at her in any other situation, Aru would have turned and run. But these horses weren’t like any she’d ever seen.

For one thing, they were made of rose petals. Their eyes were bloodred blossoms, and their floral manes were the luminous pink of dawn. When they opened their mouths to neigh, Aru saw that their teeth were tightly furled white buds.

But when they got about a foot away from Aru, they burst. Petals rained down. In their wake, she could smell wildflowers and fresh rain. It would have been pleasant if it hadn’t been for the walls shaking soon after, and the deep, dark sound echoing around them:

“WHO DARES DISTURB THE PEACE OF THIS HOME?”